SternisheFan writes: Is the love hormone the antidote to infidelity? Researchers are doing their best to find out. Being faithful to a significant other clearly involves a lot more than a hormone. There’s the biology and chemistry that attracts you to your partner, the genes that make it more or less likely that you might take risks in a relationship, your own values about fidelity and marriage, your family’s values about sameyou get the picture. But that hasn’t stopped researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany from designing an odd but intriguing experiment to study whether the much-touted “love hormone” oxytocin —the springboard for the bonds between mom and child, lover and beloved —might be enlisted to keep husbands from straying.
The study found that attached and single men given placebo, and therefore not under the influence of oxytocin, were equally likely to stand close to the attractive researcher, suggesting that monogamy itself doesn’t always elevate oxytocin levels sufficiently to promote fidelity. It takes monogamy and continued close contact with a partner to maintain those hormone levels, even after the first bloom of love has faded. “These findings suggest that women could increase the faithfulness of their partners by engaging in behaviors that stimulate his oxytocin release, including intimate relations,” says Larry Young, professor of psychiatry at Emory University. “These findings suggest that women could increase the faithfulness of their partners by engaging in behaviors that stimulate his oxytocin release, including intimate relations,” says Young.